By Tom Breihan on September 24, 2010 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

Jeremy Schmidt does more than play keyboards in Black Mountain. He's also the man responsible for much of the band's artwork, as well as the artwork for associated projects like Pink Mountaintops and Lightning Dust. He's also gone outside the Black Mountain camp to do artwork for bands like Zombi and Trans Am. With the cover for the new Black Mountain album Wilderness Heart, Schmidt has created a truly ominous, tough-to-shake image, the type of thing that sticks with you long after you see it. We caught up with Schmidt as Black Mountain soundchecked for a show in Glasgow.

By Ryan Dombal on September 15, 2010 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

For this very special edition of Take Cover, we spoke with Stanley Donwood, the man responsible for all of Radiohead's album covers from The Bends on, along with most of the band's artwork. From the bare, bleak OK Computer cover to the vibrant shots of color that spray over In Rainbows, Donwood has helped to capture all the alienation and intensity of one of the most celebrated bands of all time. Plus: Without him, there would be no Radiohead Bear.

Donwood is currently displaying his first U.S. gallery show at San Francisco's FIFTY24SF through October 27. The show is called Over Normal and features some of the same bright, oil-based colors and billboard-advertisement concepts behind his subversive Hail to the Thief sleeve. It finds Donwood turning words commonly found in spam e-mails and repurposing them as mutated and modern pieces of consumer art. Over Normal also features a vocoder-assisted, spam-based audio element called the Overnormalizer, created with John Matthias.

Click on to see some pieces from the show and read our interview with Donwood about his work with Radiohead and how his art has evolved over the years:

By Tom Breihan on July 27, 2010 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

The cover of Surfing the Void, the second Klaxons album (out August 23 on Polydor), is a picture of a cat in a spacesuit. That's kind of all you need to know. It is both awesome and nuts. Pitchfork spoke with Klaxons guitarist Simon Taylor-Davis about how this particular image came to be.

By Tom Breihan on July 9, 2010 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

When we think of fuzz-pop duo Best Coast, a few things come to mind: California, the beach, hazy summertime nostalgia, and frontwoman Bethany Cosentino's cat Snacks. All those things are present on the cover of Crazy for You, Best Coast's debut full-length due out July 27 on Mexican Summer. That cover comes from David Rager, a California native now based in Paris. Rager captured Best Coast's entire aesthetic with a bold simplicity, coming up with a great visual analog for the album's actual sounds. We caught up with Rager to talk about that album cover.

By Tom Breihan on April 12, 2010 at 1:00 a.m. EDT

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

In this installment, we check in with comic book artist Chris Bachalo (Sandman, Uncanny X-Men, Amazing Spider-Man) and Def Jam designer Alex Haldi. Bachalo and Haldi are the two men responsible for the comic book-style artwork for the Method Man/GhostfaceKillah/Raekwon collaborative album Wu-Massacre. The album cover is comprised of pieces of three variant covers, one for each rapper.Â Bachalo and Haldi imagined the three Wu-Tang Clan members as hyper-violent comic book anti-heroes, each with his own backstory and superpowers. We dork out with Bachalo and Haldi below.

By Tom Breihan on March 30, 2010 at 4:15 p.m. EDT

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

In this installment, we check in with Zola JesusfrontwomanNika Roza Danilova. The vaguely disturbing cover for Zola Jesus' new StridulumEP finds Danilova completely smothered in chocolate syrup. Indra Dunis shot the photo, and David Correll designed the layout, but the concept for the cover came from Danilova-- and, after all, she was the one drenched in syrup. We talked with Danilova over email about the cover.

By Tom Breihan on March 12, 2010 at 3:50 p.m. EST

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

In this installment, we check in with designer Brent Rollins, who created the incredible packaging for the Freeway/Jake One collaborative album The Stimulus Package. The CD comes packaged in what looks like a gigantic money clip, with lyrics and liner notes printed on what look like dollar bills with Free and Jake's faces on them. Inside, there's also a cardboard wallet, which houses the CD and a download card for an instrumental version of the album.

By Tom Breihan on December 3, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. EST

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

This installment is a little different. Instead of asking an artist about one specific album cover, we talk to perennial Okkervil River cover artist Will Schaff about the body of work he's done for the band. The Rhode Island-based artist has been responsible for every single Okkervil River album cover, helping to define the band's visual aesthetic. He gets confused with similarly named Okkervilfrontman Will Sheff so often that he had to record this PSA so that people would know the difference.

The occasion for the interview is the release of Black Sheep Boy Definitive Edition, a double vinyl album which collects Okkervil's 2005 album Black Sheep Boy and its companion AppendixEP, as well as the bonus track "The Next Four Months" (originally a B-side to "For Real"). The Definitive Edition, which comes out December 7 on Jagjaguwar, marks the first time either record has been in print on vinyl in the past three years. That's Schaff's cover above, and our interview is below.

By Tom Breihan on October 16, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists.

With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them. In this installment, we check in the American-born, Australia-based artist David Russell. Russell's long career has mostly involved conceptual and storyboard art for a huge number of movies and TV shows, and his credits include Return of the Jedi and Terminator 2. But Russell also did the ornate, fantastical cover of Ghostface'sGhostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City. Check below for our conversation with the man responsible for that mindbending image.

UPDATE: Designer and art director Patrick Hegarty writes in to point out that he also played a large part in creating the cover.

By Ryan Dombal on October 8, 2009 at 4:20 p.m. EDT

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists.

With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them. In this installment, we check in with Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio, Iran), who drew the fantastical cover for his new solo album as Rain Machine. "There's a highly psychedelic aspect to African cultures that's largely untapped as a creative inspiration today," he explained. Also: He was apparently not high when he created the sleeve. Believe it.